Tuesday, December 9, 2014

In early December 2014 I had the chance to spend a little bit more than a week in Hong Kong, to attend and present at the 2nd Conference for e-Demogracy and Open Governance in Asia (CEDEM Asia), that was organized at the City University of Hong Kong.

With a population of more than 7 million people and a tremendous economic development over the last at least 20 years, Hong Kong is considered to be the “New York of Asia”: a place where cultures, languages, people, religions, industry and research meet and produce significant results.

With Associate Professor Marko Skoric, at City University Hong Kong

The visit to the City University (CU) of Hong Kong was fun and productivity combined: CU is ranked 108th in the world, 11th in Asia and 4th in Hong Kong by the QS World University Rankings (2014/15). I had the chance to visit the Public Policy and the Media and Communication Departments, talk to faculty and students, discuss collaboration opportunities and share curriculum experiences. The Media and Communications Department, being at relevant size with my Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering department in Samos, served as a nice example for making comparisons. See the table below to understand some of those, and reach your own conclusions:

City University Hong Kong

Dep. of Media and Communication

University of the Aegean

Dep. of Information and Communication Systems

Number of Faculty

20

20

Administrative and
Technical Staff

12

6

Pre-graduate
Students

450

800

Post-graduate
Students

80

80

Annual Fee per pre-graduate
student

10,000 EUR

0 (free)

Annual Fee per post-graduate
student

>12,000 EUR

3,000 EUR

Monthly Salary of
Associate Professor (Gross, with benefits)

10,000 EUR

2,400 EUR

Average Income Taxation

10%

35%

Average rent for 80
sqm

3,000 EUR

700 EUR

The impressive Run Run Shaw building of M&C department at City University HK

Apart from
the visit to the University and the CEDEM Conference the city had a lot to
offer in site-seeing and people-watching.
Among the highlights I would pinpoint the following:

The
big (26 meters high !) statue of Buddha in Landau Island, together with the Po
Lin monastery and the whole surrounding area.
I easily spent one full day, and I could spend a lot more in the tranquility
of the whole setup.

The Big Buddha statue in Landau Island

The
Hong Kong “skyline”, which you can see either during the day or night – it is
equally overwhelming …

The Hong Kong skyline at night

But, above all, in order to understand Hong Kong, one must pay attention to the numbers - that are usually not easy to realise at first site. For example: you see a block of flats. it looks big. but if you study careffuly you count:

50 floors

24 flats per floor

A total of 50 X 24 = 1200 flats

With an average of 4 persons / flat, a total of almost ... 5,000 people in one block of flats

With a footprint of approcimately 2,000 square meters per bock of flats, you may have 20 of them in an 400 m X 400 m landplot: 100,000 people in a (large) landplot !

Typical Hong Kong block of flats -5000 people in one building

Or the metro: MTR (Hong Kong metro - stands for Massive Transportation Railway) looks like a typical metro operation, with trains and stations like in every European city. But, some attention in the numbers will reveal the following:

Each train has 12 carriages

With 34 meters length per carriage the whole train is ... 400 metres long. Each train.

When fully loaded, each train carries pprocimately 3,500 people.

In the morning rush hour, trains come every minute, from the 7 lines servicing Hong Kong centre, 3,500 people X 7 lines X 60 trains per hour = 1,5 million people per hour top capacity (the MTR carries 5,5 million people per day)

Inside the 400 meters long MTR

Last things I would like to pin-point are:

The very active General Consulate of Greece

The large open-air markets (like Greek "panigiri")

The elaborate, expensive restaurants (more than 30 michelin-stars-level) and bars in the town (try the Shangri-La or the Felix)

The live street Chinese opera singers, next to the Temle Street market, after 22:00

The V-king bar at the Hung Hong pier, a place to meet with "locals" of Asia-Pacific

So long Hong Kong ! (for the moment - already thinking to plan my next visit there ...)

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

NOMAD,
making citizens’ voices heard

Policy Formulation &Validation througn non-moderated crowd-sourcing

NOMAD is about interpreting citizens' opinions,
judgements and prejudices available on web and using them as core
information to support multiple stages of the policy life cycle from
the definition of the political agenda, the creation, the implementation
and the monitoring of policy proposals.

NOMAD is a web platform whose
main purpose is to provide decision-makers with fully automated
solutions for data acquisition, argument extraction, opinion mining,
sentiment analysis, argument summarization and visualisation that work
in a collaborative form in the policy-making arena. The NOMAD toolsuite
successfully integrates the NOMAD policy making tools under a single
work environment making it easy for the users to switch between the
modules.

In order to validate the value of
NOMAD in the policy making arena we conducted three different
pilots, covering different languages and thematic fields; Greek pilot
for energy, UK pilot for immunotherapy and Austrian pilot for open
data. Documenting the piloting experiences will provide the
opportunity to collect selected testimonies from pilot users that
might serve as references with regard to the value of the NOMAD tools
and give inspiration as to possible ways to put them in place in
participative policy-making environments.

NOMAD's Pilots

The 2nd round of
the UK, Greek and Austrian pilot workshops of the EC NOMAD project
was concluded successfully on November 2014. They all took place in
Athens and Vienna. The workshops showed that the interest of policy
makers, journalists and researchers has risen since the first round
of pilots and that they are interested in further interacting with
the NOMAD software platform. More people came in touch with NOMAD and
tried out its tools and online interface. The feedback received from
the interaction with the main stakeholders, the questionnaires and
some applications of NOMAD to smaller case studies will lead to
further improvement of the NOMAD platform.

Through the use of NOMAD the HeP identified the
“sentiment” of the active citizens and the arguments involved in the
rationale of the objectives set by the Greek authorities and assessed
the impact of NEP with special emphasis on the use of wind energy in
Greece.

Through the use of NOMAD EAACI & CP
wanted to identify the multidimensional impacts of allergic diseases in
patients’ life and the awareness of immunotherapy, as an effective
treatment, ultimately aiming to further substantiate EAACI’s policy
proposals in EU commission for immunotherapy promotion.

Through the use of NOMAD the Austrian Parliamentary
analysed the public debate on open government data and freedom of information
policies in order to obtain a clearer picture of the positions of major
interest groups towards the OGD movement and towards the movement for a
freedom of information act.

The 5th Samos
Summit on ICT-enabled Governance offered an unprecedented opportunity
to see, interact with and influence cutting-edge Information and
Communication Technologies research projects and initiatives.
Attended by high caliber experts from research, administrations and
enterprises worldwide, the Samos 2014 Summit focuses on the newest
developments of ICT applications in the areas of digital governance.

NOMAD project was
presented at this year's EACCI Congress, which took place on June 9th
this year at Copenhagen, Denmark. The audience consisted of 35
senior-level policy makers and 8,000 delegates from over 100
countries. The EACCI Congress, hosted by the European Academy of
Allergy and Clinical Immunology, offers a unique opportunity to learn
about new discoveries and exchange experience with professionals in
the field of allergy and clinical immunology.

The NOMAD project
was presented at this year's CeBIT ICT Exhibition, which took place
between March 10th and 14th this year at Hannover Messe,
Germany. CeBIT is the world's largest and most international
Information technology trade exposition. At CeBIT 2014, the leading
professionals of the ICT sector came together and showcase an extensive
range of ICT products

Get involved with NOMAD

Workshop

Demonstration

Synergy

Stay in touch

Join our workshops in autumn! Click here if you would like to participate.